1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to mobile communications and, more particularly, to polling email servers and reading data from email databases.
2. Background Art
Mobile devices are in common usage, many featuring powerful processors, larger and more colorful displays, and wireless networking capabilities. Despite these advances in mobile technology, mobile devices typically have greater limitations on memory capacity, data storage capacity, central processing unit (CPU) capacity, and networkability than workstation computers. These limitations require efficient use of resources in a mobile environment.
Interaction using data sets exchanged between mobile devices and email servers often occurs in the context of exchanges of email, calendar appointments, application data, business process tasks, and information stored in email databases. Mobile devices need to frequently communicate with email servers to retrieve emails and events related to the emails from email databases.
Many email servers are passive and lack functionality to notify mobile devices of events related to emails. When associated with such passive servers, mobile devices have to frequently poll and read the email database to check if any events, such as arrival of new emails, have occurred. Constant reading of an email server's database to check email and appointment information consumes valuable network resources. Furthermore, mobile devices use a substantial portion of CPU capacity to perform continuous polling and read operations.
Therefore, systems, methods and computer program products are needed that overcome the limitations of existing email database reading techniques and allow mobile devices to more efficiently retrieve emails and other related events from email databases.